Today, I’ll be sharing a perspective that makes the craziness, chaos and confusion of the world make absolute sense. Really? It’s a tall order, I know. Now while there is a lot I can say on this topic, I’m going to keep it concise.
We Live in Disturbing and Difficult Times
Although personally I find a lot of what’s happening in the world right now disturbing and disheartening, distracting and devastating, I see it all from a place where it all makes sense to me. And even though things look and feel really not good, there is something magnificent happening and it’s why we’re here.
So, this message is for you if you’re having a difficult time knowing how to understand the world right now, both on a global scale, but also with the day-to-day challenges of simply how to stay sane and make good decisions in your life.
And doing so all while the world becomes less predictable and stable and seemingly ever more frightening.
You Came Here For These Very Times
I invite you to consider that you came here exactly for the times that we have now entered, knowing that they would be ultimately challenging yet profoundly liberating. We all came in as a complete package. We’ve got what we need.
But what exactly is this mess that we’re in?
These are times in which limitation of all sorts that human beings have been living within and under for a huge expanse of time, these limitations will all be falling away. The potential for what human beings can be will greatly expand. And the nature of being human will go through a profound evolution into something which we cannot yet imagine.
Profound Transformation Begins with Devastation
The transformation from caterpillar to butterfly is something truly miraculous. The Phoenix burning itself up so that it can arise anew out of the ashes is immensely ennobling and inspiring.
But these transformations are by their nature devastating.
The caterpillar enters the cocoon having no idea of what awaits it. The instructions that are already built into her body begin to dismantle it, returning it to primordial goo from which an entirely different and unimaginable being emerges.
We are entering truly unimaginable times.
The Structures of the Old Must Go
So, the first thing I’d like to talk about that helps me to make sense of what’s happening with the world right now, is that the structures in which we make sense of life, that we have put together to support the life that we live individually as family or small collectives, as cultures, as states, etc., these structures need to fall apart.
Isn’t that what’s happening all around us?
You see what’s happening with various governments around the world, people rising and saying these things that you, these structures, these organizations, these governments, et cetera, these structures, do not support life here.
It’s a Natural Response to Limiting Life Conditions
The caterpillar at some point feels compelled to go and build the cocoon. The structure in which it has existed up until that moment in time has served it. But at some point, that structure no longer serves that being to continue its further evolution.
It’s a very apt metaphor for what it is that we are going through here, individually and collectively.
The ways in which human beings over the last, let’s say, 300 or 400 years, have chosen to put life together – politically, religiously, financially, communally – all these ways in which life is structured and is happening … many of these now need to fall apart.
They have come to a point, and some of them have been at that point for a very long time, where they do not support the good of the people for which they are meant to serve.
When you look around these last couple years have really shown that certain structures on the planet don’t seem to be serving the ends for which we’ve understood them to be created.
The New Form Is Calling Us Forward
For quite some time as we’re moving out of the old time, we’ll be in this in-between time before the new structures of organizing life begin to emerge.
But first the ways in which we structure life, both “out there” in the world and “in here” in our own minds and hearts, must fall apart. The outer structures in the world are, in essence, the out-picturing of our own individual and collective thinking. All of these things need to be cracked apart so that we can begin to see what has been unseeable because of the structures.
COVID Has Been a Major Catalyst
Many people over the COVID times, I guess we’re still in them, have had their lives severely disrupted. And these changes have been the cracks for people to see what wasn’t so visible before.
And as a result, many are going through a significant reckoning of their own values. Our own sense of our self, of what life is about, what’s important, how we spend our time, who we spend it with – questions such as these have become very important.
Many things that were assumed to be solid, or taken for granted, suddenly either look very different, or are no longer there.
And that can be very frightening.
Don’t Fight Things Falling Apart
Something of an entirely different order is trying to be born. Which necessitates the old falling apart.
I may not like it, it causes me pain, confusion, severe challenges and upset … but I understand that these things are having to come apart, because something new is trying to be born here.
This something new, the Phoenix rising, the butterfly emerging, will be beyond our ability to imagine now, of ways of living, ways of understanding ourselves and organizing ourselves collectively, which will be profoundly beautiful.
But in the meantime, things are falling apart.
And by understanding that it is right that this is happening, we can stop fighting so much. Because believing that something terribly wrong is happening, and doing all we can to prevent it, is causing an unnecessary level of fear and anxiety to an already challenging time.
We Must Learn to Move Through Life Differently
Now, the second thing I’d like to address is that our ways of making decisions, of navigating through our day-to-day lives, must change.
In this time in-between, with the old structures of life falling apart and the new structures not yet formed, we will have to learn to navigate very differently. You see, the “old structures” that are falling apart include our ways of making sense and making choices. So we must find new ways!
But the Old Ways Within Us are on Automatic Pilot
As the old falls away and many things that we used to count on (whether we liked them or not) become less reliable or non-existent, what will happen is that our automatic pilot of how we go about understanding the world and decision-making are still going to be operating.
And even more so when we’re in states of fear and anxiety.
Which means that we’re going to be trying to navigate new terrain through old ways of thinking.
And if you look around, this is a lot of what’s happening. It’s a lot of the kind of stuff that happens in places like social media, but also in these bigger discussions of how do we understand what we’re going through, how do we move forward, etc. There are old ways of seeing fighting each other for which is right.
And none of them is sufficient to the task at hand. They are both of the old world which is leaving us. And when people are in this automatic pilot place, the fights can only become more vehement.
Rationality is Becoming a Less Reliable Tool
One of the most significant differences between the times which we are now leaving and the times that we are moving into is that the old time was about facts, understanding, studying, planning, strategizing, implementing.
The modus operandi is to get a more “accurate” set of facts from the outside world and the plug and churn them intellectually to devise and implement a plan.
Very rational. Very do, do, do.
And in the face of the challenges we’re surrounded by, many people are going into these well-worn grooves to figure out what to do. And they’re looking “out there” to the “smart ones” to tell them what to do.
And these old ways, more often than not, are going to create a great deal more difficulty for us.
And Our Reality is Becoming Less Knowable
The old ways are the ways of the mind, and are the fruits of carefully studying and understanding the world we live in.
But that world is going away. Quickly. Very quickly.
The world for which the old navigation system worked (to the degree that it did) is going … going … and soon will be gone.
And we are finding ourselves navigating through a world of constant change, of unknown conditions and circumstances, and unforeseeable consequences.
Moving to Our On-Board GPS System
The new ways are going to be more about sensing from our own inner knowing. Not looking out there to “the authorities.” Not looking down the road to plan, strategize, and implement.
Instead, it will become much more about us living “from the gut” in your own body and sensing what feels like the right thing to do – here and now.
It’s a very different way of navigating. It’s more instinctual. More intuitive. It’s an entirely different way of navigating life for almost everybody.
Where’s the Owners Manual?
But it is built into us already.
Therefore the problem is not that we don’t have what we need. We do. We have a whole navigation system built into us already. You could say that the hardware and software already exist.
But it’s all covered with a thick layer of dust.
And after a lifetime of using an entirely different type of system, the operator doesn’t know where to begin to learn how to use it.
The Issue of Authority
The third point is that one of the main shifts that is happening is that Life in its Infinite Wisdom and Love is pushing us to come home to our own self and become our own authority.
We’ve been trained ever since we were little kids that there are these authorities in life, and they’re the ones who “know.” And if we’re smart, we’ll go to the right authority to find out from them what we need to know.
It is deeply, deeply built into us that we have to look outside ourselves to know what is true and what to do.
The Emperor Has No Clothes
And this is one thing that’s really shocked many people over the last few years: “the authorities” seem to have no freaking idea what they’re doing. And that’s the benefit-of-the-doubt assessment.
This is deeply unsettling to most of us.
What is showing itself to us is that authority (a person, organization, structure, system, ideology, law, etc) may or may not have something which is helpful to us. And it may or may not have our best interest in mind.
We cannot afford to simply consume and digest anything simply because “the authority” said so.
Owning Our Authority Means Taking Response-Ability
This new era is bringing in the absolute necessity to self-author our life, and to take upon ourselves the response-ability of our own decisions.
We will learn to come to ourselves as the ultimate arbiter of what is right for us.
And if we’re wise, we will seek out information and advice which feels to us the right place to go. I’m not saying that everybody’s to become an island, not at all. And we will take it in and use our inner GPS to find what is useful and what is not.
But this question of authority, where does authority live … It’s coming home.
# PRACTICE #
Practical Mysticism shows you how to be guided by Wisdom and Love in all of its forms to free the part of you that is already free – your Unique Genius. How? By learning to view everything that happens all day long through different lenses.
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A core principle of Practical Mysticism is this:
Who you truly are is already pure, perfect, and pristine. It knows who you are, why you’re here, what you came to do, and how to get there. No fear, no doubt, no confusion. It sees with crystal clarity and knows directly.
But this is not our experience most of the time.
That’s because our attention, our perception, our interpretation, our emotion and cognition are infinitely more conditioned and programmed than we can begin to know.
And this matrix that we live in has unwittingly caught us in an experience of fundamentally feeling that there’s something not quite right about us and the world, and that life isn’t really on our side.
So, our dilemma is not about fixing or developing ourselves, nor ascending for that matter. We’re already pure, perfect and pristine.
Instead, our job is to unlock, unlimit, and unleash this already free part of ourselves. But from what?
From the deeply embedded mechanisms, this matrix, that keeps us from living in these bodies as our Unique Genius, the Spark of the Divine that we already are.
And one of the most critical ways to do this is through the use of our attention. We use our attention to make that which is unseen … seen. We begin to make visible to us that which has always already been there, running us. But we just weren’t aware of it. Because if we don’t see it, then we’re being it. And we’re not being free.
So in alignment with the point I made about authority and bringing our authority back home, I want to invite you to begin a practice.
I invite you to simply begin to notice, just notice, some things that are going on inside of you that are not seen. Just begin to notice them.
Notice what?
Notice the various ways that you look outside yourself to know what’s true or to know what to do.
Now I am not inferring that looking outside is wrong. In fact, we need information from sources that feel to us to be helpful. But what we’re not seeing is how built into us, and how automatic and unquestioned it is, to look outside for the answer to be told what to do.
So for this next little while, get curious, take a look and see: where am I, how am I putting my authority out there?
And as you begin to make this movement in you seen (and therefore no longer unseen, automatic and unquestioned) you begin to free yourself from its influence.
This is where true transformation starts.
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The Way of the Practical Mystic
I call my body of work Practical Mysticism. Practical referring to all the stuff of our everyday human life, both inner and outer; and mysticism referring to a direct relationship with that which is ultimate or sacred in all its manifestations, everywhere.
Practical Mysticism is a multi-dimensionally pragmatic approach to participate with this mystical emergence in your everyday, day-to-day experience of living.
Daniel’s mission is to inspire, motivate, and guide those who are called to support the profound personal and planetary transformations we are going through now.
